Comment (Procurement Content)

[stephen.green@systml.co.uk]

I found what could be a serious problem in the UBL 2 prd2 Order
in that it could seriously hinder or prevent use, especially by
those who don't include tax in their orders: the replacement of
UBL 1.0's LineExtensionTotalAmount with LegalTotal leaves a
problem for the Order use - it caters for the Invoice usage in
having PayableTotalAmount but this is mandatory which is what
causes problems when the same LegalTotal is used in the Order
to provide the order total.
Implications: if I'm completing an order I do not know the
PayableTotalAmount with much certainty, only the
LineExtensionAmount. I know that there may be tax in the
PayableTotalAmount of the invoice and there may be discount
too but, especially if the order is sent to a country I'm not
familiar with, I don't know the exact amounts of these so I
can't predict the payable amount. Not everyone includes the tax
in the order (I wouldn't say doing so was intuitive anyway) but
even if I did I wouldn't be catering for the discount in the
order too.
Further Implications: this would be very difficult to fix in
further minor versions since it would be against the rules to
make relax something which is mandatory. One way might be to
make LegalTotal in the Order 0..0 and add
LineExtensionAmountTotal as with the UBL 1.0 Order. A workaround
for implementers, but a messy one, might be to deprecate the
LegalTotal in the Order by subsetting and add an extension with
a LineExtensionAmountTotal - not very satisfactory.
Better if it was possible to fix this in UBL 2.0 but might this
mean a further, third public review?